Freelancer and Freespace 2 were also peak space sim for me.
Getting about 10 hours in before dropping it, I had two big issues with Everspace 2: experience level progression and immersion.
Once I got to a new system, everything was high level, and in ES2, the level scaling means it’s more of a wall than a slaughter. There’s also no experience point rubber banding to make it worth your while.
I really enjoyed the story so far, more than Freelancer (not exactly a high bar), but I’m at a point now where I have to grind levels to continue. The above already makes me not want to, and then there are immersion problems on top of that.
In Freelancer, the whole system was loading screen free as long as I wasn’t docking. I don’t think I realized how big a deal that was until now. The transitions in and out of “jump drive space” in ES2 are a stark reminder that you’re flying from node to node, and not cruising through a star system. Other little things when off the main questline like lack of radio chatter, no consequences for looting stations, and low traffic add to the immersion problem.
I’ll probably come back to it eventually as it’s good enough, but that’s only because virtually no one is making this kind of game anymore. It feels like it wouldn’t much to surpass this game.
More than half of my personal follows on Twitter are enthusiastically jumping over. I don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter these days, so maybe I hadn’t realized it was bad enough to send people running happily into the arms of Meta.